


Prayer to My Guardian Angel

by fardareismai



Series: Make The World Better Promo [6]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 10:04:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9650960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fardareismai/pseuds/fardareismai
Summary: Chloe needs someone to watch Trixie for the evening and Lucifer is the only one available.  What could possibly go wrong.A Lucifer prompt for my Make The World Better Promo.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story is for Wholockgal, who gave money to the ACLU.
> 
> Because she's awesome for doing so, I wrote her the following prompt:
> 
> divine!bros (or holy!bros, depending on who you ask) and not!hooker trixie's bedtime. maze may or may not be around too. your choice. same for chloe.

Lux was open, for all intents and purposes, 24 hours a day.  For the right price, anyone in Los Angeles could get into the bar, could have a drink poured, and could, unless he was distracted with something else, speak to the Boss.

That said, three-thirty in the afternoon almost universally saw the Devil’s little tax shelter empty of any but the celestial and infernal beings that called LA home.

On this day, however, the bar was not being manned (Womanned?  Demon-ed?) by Maze in all of her terrifying competence.  The Lord of Hell’s right-hand demon was following LA tradition and _finding_ herself.  Apparently she’d spent enough time behind Lux’s bar to know she wasn’t there and was trying elsewhere, which meant that Lucifer had been forced to call an _agency_.  He amused himself by imagining the eternal torments he might provide the bored, gender-indeterminate voice on the other end of the phone who had sent to His den of iniquity a blonde cheerleader who had apparently cut her service-industry teeth at a honkey-tonk in Nashville before finding herself, like so much human flotsam, in California.

She didn’t suit the atmosphere at all.

“Can you _at least_ mix a martini?” he asked through clenched teeth.  She had flatly refused to learn Lux’s signature drink recipes, insisting that no one in their right mind would do such a thing to top-shelf liquor, and had spent twenty minutes bemoaning the lack of beers on tap.

“Three parts gin, one part vermouth,” she answered, her southern accent (one he usually found charming) grating on Lucifer’s ears.  “Remember that one from that bartending class I took.  But why-”

“Make one for me,” he said, cutting her off.  “Don’t bother with the vermouth.”

“You want that garnished with an olive?” she asked even as she measured the gin.

“If a cyanide pill is not available.”

“Huh?”  Her eyes were huge and guileless and vacant as the window in an abandoned house.

“Oh my Dad,” Lucifer muttered.  His most imaginative torments wouldn’t be sufficient for the hiring agency.  Dante had nothing on the real thing.

He might spare the girl herself- she was stupid, and that was annoying, and meant he might have to call in a favor from a local contact for a competent bartender, but was no sin.

Serving a martini on the rocks, as she appeared to be preparing to do, rather than shaking it, however…

She was saved his wrath by the buzzing of his phone in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“Detective,” he said into the phone, even as he glared at the gin in a tumbler glass over ice, garnished with an olive that had just been set before him.

He pointed sharply at the girl and then at the door, indicating that she could leave immediately.

“Lucifer… I know you’re busy and I really hate to ask, but I need your help with something,” Chloe Decker’s voice came over the phone at the same time that the girl behind the bar’s eyes went wide again and she asked, “what’s that, Mr. Morningstar?”

“Is there someone there with you?” the detective asked, her voice suspicious.  “Have I caught you in the middle of something?”

“No,” he bit off.  “One moment, Detective.”  He pulled the phone away from his ear and directed his fiercest look that didn’t involve revealing himself at the girl who had been wasting his liquor for an hour.  “You.  Leave.  Now.”

“I don’t understand.  I-”

“Now!” he roared, which made the girl jump and scramble away to get her purse.  Lucifer sighed, ran a hand over his face, and picked his phone back up.  “My apologies, Detective.  You need my help?”

“New girlfriend?” she asked, and he could hear her laughing at him.

“Hardly,” he answered tiredly.  The girl was pretty enough, and it was usually his (or Maze’s) prerogative to _test_ the staff, but he’d had no appetite for this girl in the slightest.  “New bartender, or would have been if she’d had even a hint of competence.  I’d sooner tend the bar myself than allow her to continue plaguing it.”

“Maze is irreplaceable, is she?” This time, the amusement was clear.

“What is it that you want from me, Detective?” he asked sharply.

“Oh!  Right!  I’ve got a case that’s going to keep me at work late tonight-”

Lucifer frowned.  “How is it that you have a case that I don’t know about?”

“Are you kidding?  I don’t need a citizen consultant on every case I run, Lucifer.  I work tons of cases that you don’t.”

“You do?”

She laughed.  “God, your ego knows no bounds.  Anyway, Dan is going to be stuck here with me-”

“You’re working a case with Detective Douche that you aren’t working with me?”

She plowed ahead, giving this question all the attention she thought it deserved.  “And with Maze off doing… whatever it is Maze is doing, I need someone to watch Trixie for me tonight until I get home.”

“And you’ve called me to ask about hiring agencies for babysitters, have you?  I don’t recommend the one this harpy came from for anything but a century of being drowned in Styx.”

“The band?”

“The _river_ , Detective.  The one that flows through Hell?”

“Right.  Whatever.  So can you do it?”

“Do what?  Oh… hire a babysitter for your spawn?  Probably but-”

“No, watch her tonight.  You don’t need to pick her up from school, just be at my place before five so Julie can get home on time and-”

“What-” Lucifer stammered, but Chloe plowed on.

“Make sure she does her homework and has dinner- not just chocolate cake!”

“Detective-”

“She can watch an hour of TV, but she has to be in bed by nine-”

“Chloe!” he cried, and his unaccustomed use of her first name stopped her in her tracks.  “Why me?” he asked into the silence on the other end of the phone line as the girl he hadn’t hired to tend his bar finally walked past him and toward the door.

“Because I trust you,” Chloe said simply.  “And Trixie adores you.”

“And children are said to be such good judges of character,” he muttered.

“Please, Lucifer?” she asked, and for the first time she sounded just slightly vulnerable.  “I haven’t got anyone else to ask.”

He sighed.  “Fine, fine.  I’ll watch the little hellion, but you owe me.  And remember- it’s no small thing to owe the Devil a favor.”

He could hear her snort on the other end of the line.  “Yeah, got it.  Remember, five.”

“Yes, I heard you the first time.  I haven’t lost my hearing in my millennia of life.  I’ll be there.”

He ended the call then and, as the elevator reached the nightclub floor called out to the bane of his existence in a short denim skirt, “wait!”

She turned to look at him, those vapid eyes confused- not that they were ever anything different.

He cocked a thumb at the bar again as he stood from his seat.  “You’ve a job for the night.  Smile and flash your tits enough and no one will notice you can’t make a drink.”

~?~?~?~?~

Lucifer should have realized that it was going far too well.

The Detective’s child had thrown herself into his arms the moment he’d walked in the door and had begun chattering at him immediately thereafter.  He didn’t think she had stopped since, but at some point she had managed to do a page of math problems and answer a list of questions about the American Founding Fathers and had even managed to guide him through the creation of macaroni and cheese out of a box.

“You do realize that isn’t actually food?” he’d asked as he’d watched her eat the stuff.

She’d grinned.  “You sound like Mommy.  I only get to have it when Daddy is watching me without her, but it’s my favorite.  Wanna try?”

He’d done so, taking a forkful of the vicious yellow glop from her bowl and putting it into his mouth.

“That is horrendous,” he’d declared.  “I wouldn’t feed the souls of the damned such rubbish… well… if they required feeding.”

She had only laughed and continued to eat with apparent relish.

While he’d tried to put to rights the disaster of the kitchen, Trixie had vanished into her bedroom only to emerge wearing what she’d claimed was her Halloween costume (“President of Mars!  Maze helped me make it!  Do you like it?”) then turned on the television to something loud and repetitive and had been bouncing on the sofa ever since.

He watched it happen, but could not stop it.  He could see that she was coming down too close to the edge of the sofa cushion.  She would land badly and flip off the side of the couch, her head would crash into the coffee table, and her neck would snap.

He could see it, all of it, played out before him in an instant.

“No!” he demanded.

“Not the child!” he begged.

“Not Chloe’s daughter,” he _prayed_.

Time stopped.

Trixie hung in the air, her foot half a centimeter above the fabric of the cushion, and Lucifer crossed to her pushing her back into safety, then turned to his brother Amenadiel, standing in the corner, watching him.

“I’m pleased to see you’ve worked out you little… power glitches,” he said, gesturing around them at the television which appeared paused and the child who appeared to defy gravity.

“As am I,” his brother said, a small smile lighting his face.  “It’s no small thing for the Devil to owe you a favor.”

Lucifer winced as the television blared back to life, and Trixie landed with a soft _flump_ onto the cushions of the sofa.

~?~?~?~?~

He stood at the door to her bedroom and watched as the child knelt at the side of her bed, folded her hands, and began to speak.

It was her words that made him tense.

“Angel of God's light, whom God sends as a companion for me on earth, protect me from the snares of devils, and help me to walk always as a child of God, my Creator.”

Bringer of Light, he had once been called.  Star of the morning.  Most beautiful and most beloved of all the Heavenly Host.

“Thank You, my heavenly friend, for your watchful care…”

He wondered…

Trixie climbed into bed and wrapped the blankets around herself, blinking sleepily and smiling at him.

“Do you say that prayer every night?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said on a yawn.  “My grandma- Daddy’s mom- taught me it.”

“I see,” he said, though he didn’t.

“Do you think God and the angels are listening?”

He looked at her for a long moment- already nearly asleep and not really interested in his answer.  He knew his father wasn’t listening- he never listened to prayers, not really.

Lucifer had been called the father of lies for so many centuries that he did not tell untruths any longer, but he could not tell the child that.

“Angels are listening,” he whispered, sure she was asleep already.

“I know,” she said, surprising him, her voice slurred with sleep.  “I can see your wings.”


End file.
